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SIGNED means that a numeric value can be positive or negative. UNSIGNED is only positive.
as all values take up a certain ammount of space, you should choose what you need: if it's only positive values you want, go for UNSIGNED, as the space is completely available for positive numbers (e.g. INT can taje values up to 65536. if it's SIGNED, you can store any value from 0 to 65535. if it's UNSIGNED, from -32768 to 32767). hope this makes it clear (and hope it's correct as well )

btw, the documentation at www.mysql.com/doc helps a lot if you've any basic questions ... keep in mind though we're not discouraging you from posting should you have any questions at all, just pointing out a good resource

i'm not newbie-unfriendly, unlike some people at a certain Perl community (not the one here!)